By Dustin Brown
It started with cars — abandoned cars, probably stolen, stripped of their parts and left to rust on the side of the road.
The forgotten shells of the crippled cars had created an eyesore along Covert Street in Ridgewood for years, tempting vandals who would set fire to their metal carcasses and distressing the residents who were forced to pass by them every day.
But the cars eventually spawned another breed of nuisance in the form of trash. One stretch of the road is now lined with mounds of garbage, plopped on the asphalt beneath the shadow of night in a forsaken industrial area along the Brooklyn border that is repeatedly targeted by illegal dumpers.
“It’s ridiculous,” said Pearline Ricketts, a 62-year-old homemaker who lives less than a block from the dumping site on the Brooklyn side of Irving Avenue. “We’re human beings, we can’t live in this kind of thing.”
On this particular day in late September, the street was home to a mound of shiny black garbage bags, crates jammed with metal piping and chunks of concrete, purple shards of glass, broken-down boxes bundled in twine and shorn weeds. Flies hovered over the pile as if they owned the airspace, and cars had to drive along the far side of the street to avoid the encroaching trash.
Although the city Department of Sanitation repeatedly sends crews to haul off the garbage, the task they face is seemingly insurmountable.
“They can clean it up and sometimes by the next week it’s back,” said Trevor Johnson, who lives down the street from the Ricketts.
“No, sometimes by the next day it’s back,” added Joy Ricketts, Pearline’s 33-year-old daughter.
When Joy’s younger sister Gladis Ricketts stood before Community Board 5 last month to lodge a complaint, she was only the latest person to call attention to an illegal dumping crisis that has plagued the neighborhood for more than a decade.
“The dumping over there has been a problem for as long as I can remember,” said Gary Giordano, the longtime district manager for Community Board 5, which covers Ridgewood, Glendale, Maspeth and Middle Village. “Maybe they see it worse in recent times.”
A disproportionately high percentage of the summonses issued by sanitation police in Queens are issued in the Ridgewood area: of the borough’s 133 violations for the fiscal year that ended in June, 27 were logged in CB 5, accounting for one fifth of the total.
The sheer scope of the dumping became evident only moments later during the same meeting, when Hernando Gallego described how refuse from a construction project had been dumped in broad daylight two days earlier on the communal driveway shared by dozens of homes between Norman and Stephen streets along Cypress Avenue.
“We have a pile of garbage right in the middle of our driveway,” Gallego said. “Kids play there near the pile of garbage.”
Giordano has compiled a list of 30 “typical dumping location” in the area covered by the community board, 24 of which are concentrated in Ridgewood and Glendale. Most are tucked alongside railroad tracks, under bridges and near cemeteries, and they are frequented by people trying to avoid paying for carting companies to haul off their industrial refuse.
The Ricketts, who have owned their building for about four decades, said the garbage problem has only developed in recent years, and they speculated that the abandoned cars set the tone that lured the dumpers there.
But Giordano remembers the neighborhood having been targeted well earlier.
“When I became district manager over 12 years ago . . . the debris that was dumped was likely to be 15 feet high, 20 feet wide, 20 feet deep,” Giordano said, describing a nearby industrial property. “And we got it all cleaned up.”
Giordano believes the only way to stop the dumping is not only to step up enforcement with undercover sanitation police, but to also publicize the cases to set an example of what happens when dumpers are nabbed.
“If somebody knows that they are being watched or that they could get caught and have a substantial fine and have their vehicle taken from them, they’re much less likely to dump than if they think that there’s very little enforcement,” Giordano said.
Indeed, sanitation police did just that the evening of Sept. 23, when they saw a Richmond Hill man allegedly remove a cubic yard of trash packed in garbage bags from his trunk and dump it on Decatur Street between Irving and Wyckoff avenues.
John Saith of 87-68 114th St. was slapped with a $20,000 fine, his car was impounded, and he was ordered to appear Wednesday in court before the Environmental Control Board, Sanitation spokesman John Pampalone said.
The Sanitation Department also deployed a crew to remove the materials dumped on the communal driveway in Ridgewood, which had amounted to seven cubic yards.
“We’re in surveillance constantly trying to catch people in the act,” Pampalone said. “Hopefully, by catching them and having these stiff fines we’ll prevent them from doing it again.”
People who observe an act of illegal dumping are encouraged to contact the Department of Sanitation with the vehicle’s description and license as well as information about the dumping site. Witnesses can receive half the fine collected if their tip leads to a conviction.
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.
